You may be noticing the word “fascia” (aka connective tissue) is a hot topic right now in all body related fields. But before we get to why fascia matters to athletes, here is a brief primer about why it’s getting so much attention these days.

First, many think of fascia as a glorified body stocking – a seamless piece of tissue that Saran wraps you just underneath the skin. While this is true of the superficial fascia, it’s important to understand it is a richly multi-dimensional tissue that forms your internal soft tissue architecture.

From the superficial (“body stocking”) fascia, it dives deep and forms the pods (called fascicles) that actually create your musculature like a honeycomb from the inside out. Imagine what it looks like when you bite into a wedge of orange and then look at those individually wrapped pods of juice.

We’re like that too! Fascia also connects muscle to bone (tendons are considered a part of the fascial system), and bone to bone (ligaments are also considered a part of the fascial system), slings your organ structures, cushions your vertebrae (yep, your discs are considered a part of this system, too), and wraps your bones.

So imagine for a moment you could remove every part of you that is not fascia. You would have a perfect 3D model of exactly what you look like. Not just in recognizable ways like your posture or facial features, but also the position of your liver, and the zig-zig your clavicle takes from that break you had as a kid, and how your colon wraps. To say it’s everywhere is far from over-stating things.

In fact, it turns out fascia’s everywhere-ness is one of the reasons it was overlooked for so long. Until recently it was viewed as the packing peanuts of soft tissue. Therefore, in dissections for study and for research, most of it was cleanly scraped away and thrown in a bucket so the cadavers could be tidily made to resemble the anatomical texts from which people were studying. Poor, misunderstood, and underrated fascia. Sigh.

Fortunately research is catching up to what turns out to be a remarkably communicative sensory and proprioceptive tissue. What fascia researchers are discovering is pretty amazing not just for fascia nerds like me, but for anyone who wants to put their body to good, healthy use. (Like, for example, all of us at Breaking Muscle!)

So without further ado, here is some of the newly emerging information about fascia and how you can use it to maximize not just your athletic performance, but also just your plain old ability to feel good in your body.

1. Fascia is a tensional fluid system

While it’s difficult for us to understand how a support structure could be a fluid structure – because we’re not exactly making hi-rise buildings out of Jell-O – it’s true. Juicy fascia is happy fascia. The best analogy I can give is of a sponge.

When a sponge dries out it becomes brittle and hard. It can easily be broken with only a little force because of how crispy it has become. However, when a sponge is wet and well hydrated it gets springy and resilient. You can crush it into a little ball and it bounces back. You can wring it and twist it, but it is difficult to break.

Once we understand that we’re like that on the inside, keeping our fascia hydrated takes on more importance. Our mobility, integrity, and resilience are determined in large part by how well hydrated our fascia is. In fact, what we call “stretching a muscle” is actually the fibers of the connective tissue (collagen) gliding along one another on the mucous-y proteins called glycosaminoglycans (GAGs for short).

GAGs, depending on their chemistry, can glue layers together when water is absent, or allow them to skate and slide on one another when hydrated.^1,2 This is one of the reasons most injuries are fascial. If we get “dried out” we are more brittle and are at much greater risk for erosion, a tear, or a rupture.

So drink more water, right? Well, yes and no. Staying hydrated via drinking continues to be important, but if you have dehydrated fascia it’s more like you have these little kinks in your “hoses” (microvacuoles), and so all that water you drink can’t actually reach the dehydrated tissue and gets urinated away, never having reached the crispy tissue.

To be able to get the fluid to all of your important nooks and crannies you need to first get better irrigated (via the microvacuoles.² And to do that, you’ve got to get work on your soft tissue to untangle those gluey bits.

Seeing a body worker who specializes in any form of myofascial work (Rolfing or other forms of Structural Integration and ART tend to be faves) will do the trick, but you can also work on this at home with the array of self-care tools for working your own fascia.

As I pointed out in last month’s post, I don’t like harder tools as they are less effective at actually “unkinking your hoses”, and Yoga Tune Up Therapy Balls and The MELT Method are my two favorite self-fascia-lovin’ systems.

2. Variation matters

Movement also gets the hydration out to the tissue as well, but that movement needs to be varied. This means variation not just of the movements themselves, but also variation of tempo.

Not only does moving constantly in the same ways and in the same planes put you at further risk for joint erosion (a là osteoarthritis), but you are also dehydrating the fascia in a particular pattern, thus setting you up for that brittle tissue that injuries love so much.

As Tom Myers, fascial educator and creator of Anatomy Trains, says in this video:

“Rest is how the tissues rehydrate. When you do heavy exercise you are driving the water out of the tissue in the same way that if you step on a wet beach you push the water out of the sand, and when you pick up your foot the water seeps back into that sand. You’re doing the same thing with tissues, when you’re really working out you are driving the water out of the tissue while you are working…The rhythm [of your fitness regimen] should include some rest… When you take the strain off of the tissues, like a sponge they will suck up that water and be ready for more exercise.”

This certainly makes a good argument for functional fitness work like MovNat that takes its inspiration, wisely, from the constantly varying movements of our ancestors, and also shines a light on the benefits of a good high intensity interval training (HIIT) program.

3. It’s all connected

Let’s say, for example, that you are in your kitchen and your leg is in your bedroom. This is an example of not being connected. You may also notice it’s an example of a potential plotline for Dexter. Something has gone horribly wrong in this scenario.

Okay, okay, so we were not dropped on our heads as children and we get it that our parts aren’t detachable. But the problem comes when we think of them as attachable. Because of the way we all learn and study anatomy – whether the extent of your studying was singing “the hip bone’s connected to the thigh bone!” song in preschool, or something more extensive – we conceive of human bodies as “attached” by magical soft tissue versions of tape.

In anatomy-speak we describe all muscles as having an origin and an insertion. So for example, the gastrocnemius muscle (our most superficial calf muscle) originates on the lateral and medial condyles of the femur (thigh) bone, and inserts on the calcaneus (heel bones), via the Achilles tendon. It makes it sound like it is taped or stapled to be “attached” at its origin and insertion points – like it’s this separate thing that gets stuck onto other separate things.

A more clear and true to human anatomy description would be that the gastrocnemius becomes the Achilles tendon (by weaving more densely until muscle becomes tendon) and that then becomes the calcaneus bone (by weaving more densely until tendon becomes bone).

I am not just trying to belabor anatomy semantics. This is important because it gives us a handier understanding of how you just plain can’t have something happen to one “part” of your body and not have it affect every other “part” of your body, albeit in varying degrees of intensity. Often in the fascia-geek worlds we’ll use the example of wearing a tightly knit sweater.

If you tug on one end of that sweater, you see the tug travel long distance to other ends of the sweater. For athletes, this brings the dreaded domino effect into a clearer perspective.

Many of you have experienced the domino effect without having had a name for it. First, your neck gets injured in a minor whiplash in that teeny tiny no big deal car accident that you had when you were sixteen years old.

But you’re sixteen years old, so no biggie. You ignore it and it gets better. But once you enter college, suddenly you have this nagging shoulder pain with all the extra typing and sitting you’re doing. As the years go by you start to think of yourself as the “tight-shouldered” person, and sometimes you have a pinching pain when you lift your arm.

More years go by and you are now not only a “tight-shouldered person,” but you also suffer from occasional low back spasms and have developed plantar fasciitis, which you assume must be because you’re a runner and everyone says running is bad for you. I could go on, and this is just one quick sketch of one type of domino effect out of the infinite possibilities, but you get the idea.

The thing this person is experiencing is actually the long, slow drain of an unaddressed compensatory pattern on a body, but in our culture we call it, “just getting old.” The best way to avoid the domino effect is to keep your fascia healthy so that nothing gets jumbled up in the knit of the “sweater” and you are therefore at much lower risk for developing a compensatory pattern which, by its very nature, is always going to be global.

4. Its springiness wants to help you out

What do you get when you add juiciness to connectedness? Springiness! When your tissue retains (or regains) its natural spring, the rebound effect of the fascia allows you to use less muscle power, and therefore fatigue less rapidly. Want to jump higher, run faster, and throw farther? You’ll need to pay attention to nourishing the elastic quality of your fascia.

For example, when you run with healthy fascia the force you transmit into the ground gets returned to you through the whole tensional network of the fascia. It’s like you have a little built-in trampoline action going on.

So once you’ve done the work to rehydrate your tissue, you’ll want to embrace bouncy movements. Some good examples of how you can best play with this are running, jumping rope, box jumps, and kettlebells. All martial arts forms also rely on the inner spring. That’s why they’re so cool.

5. It is the largest and richest sensory organ of the body

Now this little tidbit of recent fascial research was a shocker. It turns out fascia is one of our richest sensory organs with between six to ten times higher quantity of sensory nerve receptors than the muscles.³ In fact, it is possible fascia may be equal or superior to the retina, which has so far been considered the richest human sensory organ.³

This makes your fascia a system of proprioception – i.e. of knowing where your body is in space, but also of graceful full body orchestration of movement. Therefore, well-hydrated and supple fascia is crucial to maintaining your natural settings for alignment and function.

And maintaining those natural settings will keep small problems from snowballing into larger ones, keep injuries from becoming chronic issues that flare in and out of life, and keep you mobile and functional for longer through life – as in moving well, but also the perks of that, some of which are avoiding nasty surgeries and joint replacements.

While it’s impossible to not be using at least some of the sensory qualities of fascia (unless you have a disease process that is interfering with it), a way to play with waking up the full potential of your own proprioception is to return, as I already covered, to constantly varied movements.

To really Zen-out on noticing your proprioceptive abilities, a barefoot (or minimal footwear) hike over varying terrain mixed with balancing across logs along the way will certainly get the sensory juices flowing. Again, this makes MovNat a great choice.

Whew. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. But it’s plenty to chew on for now! So go forth, love your fascia, and train happily.

References:

1. Thomas W. Findley, MD, PhD, “Fascia Research From a Clinician/Scientist’s Perspective,” International Journal of Therapeutic Massage and Bodywork, (2011).

2. J.C. Guimberteau, “The Sliding Mechanics of the Subcutaneous Structures in Man Illustration of a Functional Unit: The Microvacuoles,” Studies of the Académie Nationale de Chuirurgie (2005).

3. Robert Schleip et al., Fascia: The Tensional Network of the Human Body (Elsevier, 2012), 77.

Photos courtesy of Shutterstock.

The post The Top 5 Ways Fascia Matters to Athletes appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

Self-myofascial release is a fancy term for self-massage to release muscle tightness or trigger points. This method can be performed with a foam roller, lacrosse ball, Theracane, or your own hands. By applying pressure to specific points on your body you are able to aid in the recovery of muscles and assist in returning them to normal function. Normal function means your muscles are elastic, healthy, and ready to perform at a moment’s notice.

Left photo: Calf bottom. Right photo: Calf top.

Do I Have Tight Muscles or Trigger Points?

Trigger points are specific “knots” that form in muscles. They are unique and can be identified because they will refer pain. Pain referral, for our purposes, can most easily be described as the pain felt when pressure is applied to one area of the body, but the pain is felt or radiated in another area.

A common example of a trigger point is felt while foam rolling your iliotibial (IT) band as it causes pain to radiate up to the hip or all the way down the leg to the ankle. When rolling or working on tight/sore muscles you will experience discomfort or pain. Think of it like the pain you get while stretching. It should be uncomfortable, but not unbearable, and when you are done it should feel better.

Left photo: Chest – front delt. Right photo: Lats.

Why Am I Doing Something That Hurts?

For many, deep tissue massage is easy to understand. Ideally someone is able to work out the knots in your muscles, and it is commonly known this process may be uncomfortable and at times painful. Self-myofascial release provides the user the ability to control the healing and recovery process by applying pressure in precise locations, because only you can feel exactly what is happening.

It is always recommended to consult with your physician or physical therapist for therapeutic/sharp pain and receive approval before starting self-myofascial release. For most people you will be cleared immediately and your doctor will encourage the practice.

Releasing trigger points helps to reestablish proper movement patterns and pain free movement, and ultimately, to enhance performance. Utilizing stretching alone is not always enough to release muscles tightness, which is why foam rollers have thrived on the mass market. Imagine a bungee cord with a knot tied into it and then envision stretching the cord. This creates tension, stretching the unknotted portion of the muscle and the attachment points. The knot, however, has remained unaltered.

Foam rolling can assist in breaking up these muscle knots, resuming normal blood flow and function. The goal to any corrective or recovery technique is to get you back to the point of normal functioning, as if nothing was ever wrong. When was the last time you trained like you were a teenager, going hard without a second thought, and injuries were something that only happened due to physical trauma like a 250lb linebacker hitting you?

Left photo: Hip adductor. Right photo: Hip extensor – glute.

Left photo: Hip flexor. Right photo: Inner quad.

What Causes Trigger Points and Tight Muscles?

Both have the same contributing factors including training, flexibility, movement patterns, posture, nutrition, hydration, rest, stress, and other lifestyle factors. Our bodies learn to compensate for what we throw at them every day, but we can exceed our ability to recover via too many intense workouts, poor posture, and other lifestyle factors.

This is when you need assistance using recovery techniques or through seeing a professional. If you lived a perfect life with everything in balance, you would theoretically never have either of these conditions, however I’ve yet to meet that person.

How Does Self-Myofascial Release Work?

Deep compression helps to break up or relax tight muscles and adhesions formed between muscle layers and their surroundings. Imagine you are tenderizing your own muscles. They should be soft and supple like a baby’s muscles. However, if our muscles are not taken care of properly we can experience loss of flexibility, adhesions, and painful movement.

The deep compression of self-myofascial release allows normal blood flow to return and the restoration of healthy tissue. The body naturally wants to be healthy and strong, but sometimes an extra boost is needed to achieve optimal muscle and tissue health.

Left photo: IT band bottom. Right photo: IT band top.

Continue with How Do I Know What to Foam Roll and How to Do It? on page two.

How Do I Know What to Foam Roll and How to Do It?

Areas to focus on can be identified in two different ways. The first is through screenings. If you have followed the last two articles – squat screening and hip hinge screening – and have had struggles with either movement, you should include foam rolling in your workout and recovery program. You may target specific areas/muscles that relate to the movements you are focusing on.

If after using the foam roller your movement improves, you have a more specific strategy to follow. Secondly, trigger points and tight muscles can be found through self-exploration, utilizing the list of techniques below and exploring each one.

To foam roll properly, apply moderate pressure to a specific muscle or muscle group using the roller and your bodyweight. You should roll slowly, no more than one inch per second. When you find areas that are tight or painful, pause for several seconds and relax as much as possible. You should slowly start to feel the muscle releasing, and after 5-30 seconds the discomfort or pain should lessen.

If an area is too painful to apply direct pressure, shift the roller and apply pressure on the surrounding area and gradually work to loosen the entire area. The goal is to restore healthy muscles – it is not a pain tolerance test. You may also use other objects to work on muscles such as a tennis ball, lacrosse ball, Theracane, or Trigger Point Therapy Kit.

Never roll a joint or bone. Avoid rolling your lower back. To target these muscles I recommend using tennis or lacrosse balls. If you are having issues with your neck, refer these issues to an appropriate medical professional, as these areas they can be more sensitive and require more advanced attention.

Left photo: Lacrosse ball – hip. Right photo: Lacrosse ball – shoulder blade.

What Happens After Foam Rolling?

You may be sore the next day. It should feel as if your muscles have been worked/released, however you should not push yourself to the point of excessive soreness. Drink plenty of water, get enough sleep, and eat clean. This will help to flush your system and fuel your muscles more effectively. Give it 24-48 hours before focusing on the same area again.

Left photo: Mid-back. Right photo: Upper back.

Check out these related articles for more on foam rolling:

• The Perfect Squat: 7 Articles to Help You Achieve It
• Your IT Band is Not the Enemy (But Maybe Your Foam Roller Is)
• How Foam Rolling Relieves the Pain of Working a Desk
• The FMS – 8 Articles to Help Assess Yourself and Your Clients
• Explore the Breaking Muscle Home Page

The post What Is a Foam Roller, How Do I Use It, and Why Does It Hurt? appeared first on Breaking Muscle.